Carnival of Lean Leadership

Those of you who are regular blog readers know that a "blog carnival" is a post that links to recent posts at many other blogs that revolve around a central topic.  The concept was originally popularized by politically-oriented blogs, with topics such as "carnival of the capitalists" and "carnival of liberty", but has also extended to more mainstream topics like "carnival of the recipes" and "carnival of the cats."  So... here we go with an attempt at a "carnival of lean leadership"...

Lean government has been a topic in several blogs, including our own Evolving Excellence, especially in light of the budgetary issues surrounding the hurricane Katrina relief effort.  The Gemba Panta Rei blog also discusses how Iowa's governor is using kaizen and other tools to create a lean state government.  Curious Cat has a couple of recent posts on the same topic, beginning with a reference to the Gemba blog and some additional detail on "leaning" the child welfare system.  A later post then describes various winners of the first Public Sector Shingo Prize, such as Robins Air Force Base, Letterkenny Army Depot, and others.  Business & Technology Reinvention also discusses government... from a leadership standpoint.

Decision-making is a recent focus of the Learning About Lean blog, with a discussion on the wisdom of Peter Drucker.  The Be Excellent blog, one of our favorites, has a great article on the characteristics of a good leader.

Losing and winning are topics in two of our favorites.  The Common Sense Guy shows how leadership lessons from a baseball team can transform a culture of losing by creating a plan, communicating the plan, and executing the plan.  The Lean Manufacturing Blog discusses the same Wall Street Journal article from a factory perspective.

Quality is the focus of one of the newest blogs, Mike Wroblewski's Got Boondoggle.  This particular post compares Catholic sins to defects... an interesting and thought-provoking perspective.  Mike's blog has several other top-notch articles on root cause and other topics.  iSixSigma has a very active blog focusing on... six sigma.  Many of the posts describe six sigma successes at various companies, but others discuss issues such as the impact of six sigma on innovation.

SuccessFactors is a good place to start to explore the people side of lean leadership.  A recent post talked about how to improve the performance management process.  The High Performance Business blog has a detailed article on teambuilding.  Strategize discusses customer-centric management and the always-favorite Fast Company has a good article how to "listen to the whisper" when working on your organization's vision and mission.  Management Craft really wants you to get your staff to start thinking outside of the box.

For the more political side of manufacturing, take a look at the blog of the National Association of Manufacturers.  Their posts discuss the manufacturing side of issues such as the supreme court, taxation, unions, and even the Kyoto Accord.

That's it for this carnival.  We'll try to do this again every few weeks.  If you have a favorite lean leadership blog, please let us know.  Keeping up with blogs can be time-consuming... so we suggest using the free Bloglines to automatically keep you updated on new posts from your entire list of blogs... including Evolving Excellence from Superfactory.